


Skeletons in the Closet

by Duck_Life



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Family Secrets, Future Fic, Gen, Mother-Son Relationship, Team as Family, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-11 22:10:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16861192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duck_Life/pseuds/Duck_Life
Summary: Shogo finds out about Jubilee's time as a vampire.





	Skeletons in the Closet

For some adopted kids, finding out you're adopted is the Big Reveal. Shogo has a different one.

He's grown up knowing he was adopted. (“Finders keepers,” his mother always used to say.) So if there's no secret, why do Uncle Jono and Aunt Paige get evasive sometimes when he asks about what his mother was like before him? 

When people slip up around him, when they mention how Jubilee was Before, they use words like “affliction" and “condition,” so he knows she used to be sick.

He remembers that, kind of. In his earliest memories, his mother stays out of the sun and eats different food than him and Uncle Jono. In his earliest memories, in old photographs, she looks paler than she does now.

He finds her box one time, an ornate wooden box that looks like a gift from Logan. Inside are some letters, two X insignias, a gun with the barrel plugged up and a weird, heavy medallion. 

Shogo puts the medallion around his own neck and looks in the mirror. It’s like a weight against his chest. He can't figure out why she has it, and why she keeps it tucked away. For some reason, the medallion is even more intriguing than the gun.

* * *

“I know you were sick,” Shogo says, finally confronting her. “When I was really little, you were sick. I just wanna know what you had. Was it T.O.? The Legacy Virus? M-Pox?”

“Baby,” she says, sitting down beside him on her bed, putting an arm around him. She always calls him baby, year after year. He used to wonder when he'd outgrow it, but lately he's been hoping he never does. “I’ll tell you. I will. I just… you gotta remember that whatever else I was, the most important thing I am is your mom. Since the day I found you, that's been the most important thing. Nothing stopped me from being that for you.”

“So you _were_ sick.”

“... Kind of,” she says. “Just not the way you're thinking.” He waits for her to elaborate but she doesn’t. But he’s not backing down; he’ll wait her out. Shogo settles back on his mom’s bed, messing up the laundry she’d been folding. His old Bamf doll is flopped against her pillow. He toys with it while waiting for her to speak. “Shogo… did Auntie Ororo ever tell you about Dracula?”

Auntie Ororo is one of the best people to get stories from. She forgets what is and isn’t age-appropriate, and it helps that Shogo knows how to fake her out, make her think he already knows things he doesn’t. Auntie Ororo’s the one who told him the truth about Dark Phoenix, Illyana’s weird backstory and Santa Claus. And, yes, she briefly told him about her experience with Count Dracula. “She said the X-Men fought him, and won,” Shogo says. 

His mom nods. “That was a long time ago,” she says. “Before I even knew Auntie Ororo or Uncle Logan. But then, um… a few years before you were born, before I found you, I was in San Francisco. There were these, ah, vampires, trying to infect humans. They… I, um, I was infected.”

“By  _ vampires _ ?” Shogo says. For a second, he thinks she’s messing with him. She does that a lot. Just this month alone, she’s tried convincing him that 1. Uncle Logan was cloned from an actual wolverine and 2. Remy’s weird eyes were from eating too much hot sauce. But his mother looks dead serious right now. “What happened?”

“What do you think happened, goof?” she says, nudging him. “I turned. I was a vampire.” 

He stares at her, trying to absorb that. His mother who plays jokes on him and blows raspberries and picks all the marshmallows out of Lucky Charms with him… a bloodsucking fiend. “But… you’re not now.”

“Yeah,” she says, ruffling his hair. “That’s thanks to Quentin.”

“ _ Quentin _ ?” He’s grown up with a rotating cast of babysitters plucked from his mom’s mentees. He adores the majority of them. Quentin is the exception. 

“That’s right,” Jubilee says, grinning with teeth that aren’t fangs. “When you were… oh, about two or three… Quentin had a bunch of power saved up. And he used it all to devamp me.” As if to prove it, she sets off a couple firecrackers from her fingertips. 

“Wow,” Shogo says, not really sure what else to say. He almost asks,  _ Did you ever kill anybody? _ , but then he stops himself. His mom never looks scared of anything, but she was scared to tell him this. He can tell. She was scared to let him know what she used to be like. 

It’s that weird realization that parents are people, too. In addition to being the woman who feeds him, buys him clothes and does different funny voices when she’s reading him bedtime stories, Jubilee is a person with thoughts and feelings and guilt and trauma, and he’s not exactly sure how to think about all that. 

So he just hugs her and says, “Love you, Mom. Thanks for telling me.” 

“Eh, it was bound to come up eventually,” she says, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. “And hey, somethin’ to talk about right? I bet none of your friends have moms who used to be vampires.”

“Well, MJ’s mom’s a werewolf,” he points out. 

She laughs. “You tell Moira Jean that I’m cooler than both her moms, alright? I don’t care if one of them’s a Valkyrie.” 

“I’ll tell her.” 

“That’s my boy,” Jubilee says, mussing his hair again. “That’s my boy.” 


End file.
